PENNY BROADHURST & THE MAFFICKERS

Our friend Jude Ely passed away suddenly on Wednesday and she will well and truly be missed. She was supportive of Penny from very early on and was wonderfully warm, wise, caring and funny.

RIP Jude and much love to your friends (of which there were many) and family.

This is a long blog with lots of photos, but I had a great time at Indietracks so it needs to be documented! My feet were attacked by ants, but I met some amazing and wonderful people and heard some incredible music. I also danced like an idiot and went on train rides. Highlights include:

* Brontosaurus Chorus

* Pocketbooks
* Town Bike

* The Seven Inches

I've been laid up with flu for the past week and am still feeling groggy and ill, so no big update, alas. The gig last week at Trash with Ainslie Henderson was fun, and was filmed, so footage may well emerge at some point. The film crew plus the event's official photographer took some pics - I'll post a few below and the rest are on my Flickr page. In other exciting news, ace writer Neil Gaiman has been listening to one of my songs - Last.fm has the evidence (click below for the bigger picture)...

It's time for another update, I suppose. The past few weeks have been awash with preparations for Pennfest 2008. I say 2008 as we plan on doing it again next year. I've been rehearsing, promoting, making and distributing posters, buying sweets, writing the next issue of my mini zine, folding and cutting photocopies of the zine and flyers and so on.

February has been a frantic month. Between musical and personal activity, I haven't had much time to think. I did get a new haircut, though. I'm still growing said hair.

The first gig of the month was a very short set at Bar Risa in Leeds. It was a benefit to raise money to subsidise a coach, to take women down to London to march for A Million Women Rise. It was an odd sort of environment in which to play, but strangely fun.

It has been a busy old time of late. On the 13th of January, Emil, Si and I headed over to Hull to record an acoustic session for Raw Talent. Now, I'm not an acoustic act. I've never played an acoustic gig, but we had rehearsed a lot and the excitement was every bit as present as the nerves. Producer Katy Noone and presenter Alan Raw were very welcoming, and the session went well. It was fun trying to get Emil's trumpet not to deafen everyone (in the end he played across the mic) and, unbeknownst to me, my mic wasn't working for the first part of my interview with Alan.

Poster about the BBC's Next Big Thing competition in BBC Television Centre. Many thanks to Steve Perkins for the photo. I'm a big BBC fangirl, so it means the world to me.

Today we worked on the demo of the Song version of Fun Pub. Oh, I should tell you really - there are two versions of this track. This song version and a more groove-based version called the Narrative version. The Narrative version (unwieldy, I know) takes the chorus from the Song version but the verses come from the original monologue on which the song was based. If you want to read an early version of the monologue, it's in my book, That Way Out, which you can find in the Other Stuff section of this website.

I'm in the studio tomorrow and hopefully I'll be able to update you with some snippets afterwards. I haven't recorded for a while and I'm getting twitchy!

This is where any non-news musings will be posted.